Why Adobe, Starwood, Chesapeake, Wynn and Columbia Pipeline Are Flying High Today

The markets are surging today, with all major U.S stock indexes up by about 0.5%, and oil up as well. Among the stocks driving the surges in the markets, investors can count Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc (NYSE:HOT), Adobe Systems Incorporated (NASDAQ:ADBE), Chesapeake Energy Corporation (NYSE:CHK), Wynn Resorts, Limited (NASDAQ:WYNN) and Columbia Pipeline Group Inc (NYSE:CPGX), all of which have made big gains today as of early afternoon trading. Let’s take a look at the events behind these gains and into what the hedge funds in our database think about the companies in question.

At Insider Monkey, we track around 785 hedge funds and institutional investors. Through extensive backtests, we have determined that imitating some of the stocks that these investors are collectively bullish on can help retail investors generate double digits of alpha per year. The key is to focus on the small-cap picks of these funds, which are usually less followed by the broader market and allow for larger price inefficiencies (see more details about our small-cap strategy).

Let’s start with Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc (NYSE:HOT), which is up by almost 5% in trading today. The company announced this morning that it was calling off its deal with Marriott International Inc (NASDAQ:MAR), which had offered $12.2 billion to acquire the company, in order to take a higher bid from a consortium of investors led by the Chinese insurance company Anbang and J.C. Flowers. The group offered $78 per share in cash, or more than $14 billion. The owner of the Sheraton and Westin hotel brands gave Marriott until March 28 to submit a counteroffer.

More than 6% of the funds that we track (52 out of roughly 785) were long Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc (NYSE:HOT) as of the end of the fourth quarter. These firms held more than 27% of the company’s total shares. Among them was John Paulson’s Paulson & Co, which disclosed ownership of 11.6 million shares of the company as of the end of 2015, making it the largest investor of record to date.

Next up is Adobe Systems Incorporated (NASDAQ:ADBE), which is up by about 4.5% this afternoon following the release of the company’s first quarter of fiscal year 2016 financial results on Thursday evening. The software maker posted earnings of $0.66 per share for the quarter, beating the Street’s consensus by $0.05, on revenue of $1.38 billion, which also came in $40 million above expectations. Guidance was also strong; management said that it envisions fiscal second quarter revenue of $1.365 billion-to-$1.415 billion and EPS of $0.64-to-$0.70. Analysts have predicted sales of $1.39 billion and EPS of $0.65.

Adobe Systems Incorporated (NASDAQ:ADBE) is a popular stock among hedge funds. 46 firms in our database disclosed long positions in the company as of December 31, with their combined stakes valued at more than $3.71 billion and accounting for almost 8% of the company’s shares. The largest shareholder in our system was Jeffrey Ubben’s ValueAct Capital, which held 14.01 million shares of the company worth $1.31 billion.